Amanda L. Watson's home page

Teaching

Hello, neglected blog! I’m still here, just preoccupied with other writing projects, so blogging has fallen rather by the wayside. I have plenty of updates to share about said writing projects, but I’ve been meaning to post this, so here goes. Last semester I was prepping for a library class when an idea popped into […]

Yesterday was the International Day for Failure, which I heard about via the Library Loon and various others on Twitter. I’d been mulling this post for about a week, and I was going to actually write the thing yesterday so as to be timely, but, well, I kinda failed at that. It was prompted by several […]

(This is a semi-stream-of-consciousness post. I'm thinking out loud rather than posing a question I have real answers to. But it's been on my mind lately; if any of you have any better answers than I do, have at it in the comments!) A couple of the people I follow on Twitter posted links today […]

I’ve been thinking, in a work-related context, about close reading, and how librarians might help students learn to do it. The standard "bibliographic instruction" model — class meets in library, librarian shows students how to find what they need — tends to be geared toward paper research. Close reading is a skill that isn’t usually […]

So today I taught a library instruction session for a class. In a classroom whose technological setup I hadn’t checked in advance. (Those of you who do anything at all with instructional technology probably know where this is going.) And after I’d discovered that there was no computer in the room and raced back to […]

This was the last week before the spring semester gets underway, and I spent most of it wrapping up a big web-design project I’ve been working on intermittently for the last year. It’s for an undergraduate class that’s been in the works for some time. I’m doing some librarian outreach work with the students in […]

The semester is officially over and the grades are in, which means that it’s officially Grade Complaint Season. I don’t mind showing students numerical breakdowns of how they did in class (actually, I do mind that, a bit; I hate having to quantify everything), but what I really don’t like is finding multiple "Why did […]

1. Clean the refrigerator. 2. Go to the nearest big grocery store, which is two or three miles away. On foot. (Actually, it’s a nice energetic 45-minute hike if the weather is good and I’m in the mood for exercise, which I was yesterday. And I take the bus home, because another 45-minute hike with […]

Irascible Professor guest blogger and high school teacher Elise Vogel lets fly at the culture of parent complaint in public school education: Nothing in my teacher education courses had prepared me to deal with parents who would object that I assign homework, or who would take their objections not just to me, but to the […]

By one of those weird coincidences that seem to happen in the academic blogosphere, I read Naomi Chana’s post about rate-your-professors sites only hours after I’d stumbled upon one of those sites myself. The temptation to look up my own name was irresistible, and there it was, with a happy face next to it. Someone […]